“McQueen: Sartorial Learnings of Kazakhstani Publicity Tart For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Hoxton” anyone? With his latest take on swimwear, Alexander McQueen seems to be “channeling” Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat character, offering a version of the audacious “mankini” the comedy actor wore in his movie a couple of years ago.
McQueen’s swimming brief might be a little more subtle than Borat’s but it is just as ridiculous. At least the Kazakstani mankini had a construction designed for practicality; its over-the-shoulder straps providing vital lift and support while ingeniously leaving a great expanse of white flesh completely denuded and ready for painful sunburn.
Unless you are a perfect model size, with torso and legs in a specific proportion, you may have trouble wearing the “McQuini.” Men with long, rangey bodies will find themselves encountering an eye-watering triple wardrobe malfunction of a garroted windpipe, testicular bifurcation and a tan with a stripe down the middle of the chest that will look like a particularly brutal open-heart surgery scar. In hot conditions, it would be possible to un-noose yourself from the collar and let the long tie thing dangle down between your legs, as if doing a schoolboyish elephant impression, but then you’d look even sillier.
More importantly, isn’t the mankini a bit spring/summer 2006, darlings? Hasn’t it passed its sell-by date, along with using the phrase “Jagshemash!” as a greeting? In short, aren’t these disturbing T-bar trunks the sort of thing that Alexander “Lee” McQueen shouldn’t be putting his name to.
Firebox, a Web site that specializes in party costumes, practical jokes and novelties, has been doing officially licensed Borat mankinis (10 percent elastane, 90 percent polyester, one size fits all — Naaice!) at US$19.80 each since November, 2007, and they’ve already sold more than 10,000. “We have been overwhelmed by the response,” says Firebox director Christian Robinson. “We never thought that something so humiliating would prove to be so popular.” Go to the Firebox Web site and you’ll see that lots of satisfied customers have posted up pictures of themselves wearing their mankinis on various raucous evenings out. Here’s Daz and Ben, Kevin and a Yorkshire-man called Rona whose mankini caption reads, “You’re never too old.” Actually, on second thoughts, don’t look at that one.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
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It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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